


Reconnect

by waveleafcloud



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Catharsis, Depression, Let's just save our overthinking for the fanfiction, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 06:26:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18685951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waveleafcloud/pseuds/waveleafcloud
Summary: Despite everything, depressed, unremarkable Quentin Coldwater, the one who wasn’t chosen but just kept coming back anyway, who doesn’t give up, who believes in magic, still dares to hope.Or, in which Quentin is definitely the fool of this story.





	Reconnect

**Author's Note:**

> So here I am, showing up late to this fandom with a self-indulgent and now totally irrelevant retelling of the entire show. Hi! The important things to know are:  
> 1\. This story blithely ignores canon after 4x05. (Honestly, it skips and handwaves a lot of plot points. Let’s assume they get Eliot back, and have plenty of time for daytime TV and awkward conversations afterward.)  
> 2\. Warnings for depression and explicit discussions of suicidal ideation. Also, unhealthy levels of avoidance, denial, repression, self-hatred, and poor communication. **ETA: if you are concerned about the mention of suicidal ideation and want to know more before proceeding, please see the endnotes for more details.  
> 3\. If you’re worried about Quentin/others, rest assured that this is emphatically Quentin/Eliot endgame. Before that, we go through canon unrequited Quentin/Julia, as well as Quentin/Alice (again, ignoring the latter half of season 4).

**i. Julia**

So this thing he has: it’s a state of disconnection and dissociation. Sometimes it feels like the world isn’t real, but maybe (his mind whispers) the world is perfectly real as it rushes by, and he’s the nothingness, the non-entity. (Useless, pointless, worthless, always too little or too much, and always at the wrong time.) The world is not the problem.

In his old life, Quentin never actually makes it to the top of a building to stand at the edge, but he stands by windows or on balconies sometimes — second floor, fifth floor, tenth floor — and looks down at the world with all its moving pieces. Thinks about closing the distance, hitting the ground and finally joining them. His life doesn’t work; maybe his death will. Maybe not. Maybe he fails at everything.

His brain breaks sometimes. He has to piece himself back together.

And it’s not just that he doesn’t fit into the world: he doesn’t even fit together properly himself. Is it being broken down and put back together repeatedly that does it? Or was he always like this, a jumble of mismatched bits and pieces, and that’s why he never belonged in the world to begin with?

He laughs when other people are serious. He can’t even summon a smile at a party to blend in with the crowd. He can never tell when he should say “I’m fine” and when they actually want to hear about how he’s doing. Social interaction is a quagmire of anxiety and misery that he doesn’t want to wade through, but when he escapes to solitude, he wishes he had stayed a little longer and been less alone.     

He loves his dad, and he knows his dad loves him. But he doesn’t know what to say to take that look off his dad’s face, doesn’t know how to express his fear of being a disappointment and a burden, without making the look worse. He learns card tricks instead, gets good at them, even, like that’s some kind of acceptable alternative for normal communication. His dad tries, but when the novelty wears off and no one wants to watch anymore, he’s just left alone shuffling a deck.

Then there’s Julia: lovely, brilliant, kindhearted Julia who has an imaginative streak to meet his own, who loves Fillory and manages to make his stupid thoughts seem beautiful. Her eyes get that worried, pitying expression too, sometimes, but the first time it happens and he backs away because he’s ruined it again, said too much or been too little as usual, she reaches out and takes his hand. “Hey, c’mere, I want to show you something,” she says, and leads him under the table. Lies down next to him. Talks about her plan to make a map of Fillory: “Something permanent, not just a piece of paper. Like it’s etched into the wood, waiting for someone on a quest to find it one day.” And she keeps going, gentle but immovable, until he can find words again, short answers at first and then long rambling additions to her ideas.         

Of course he’s in love with her.

Of course she doesn’t return his feelings. But that doesn’t matter, because she’s kind enough to take no notice of them, and to go on being Julia, his best friend, and that’s enough. That’s more than someone like him can expect from the world.

High school is the first time Quentin sees how much being his best friend is holding her back.

On the rare occasion that Julia’s sick enough to skip out on a day of learning, Quentin stops by classrooms to turn in her assignments and collect her make-up work, and then sits alone at break, at lunch, in his own classes. Sometimes he doesn’t say anything to anyone the whole day, except the teachers he has to talk to for her, or the ones who call on him even though he never raises his hand.

When Quentin is hospitalized for the first time, Julia visits him almost every day that the doctors allow her to. Brings her homework and talks through it aloud so he won’t be too behind, as though he’s listening.   Throws increasingly unlikely Fillory theories around for hours. Tries her best to hide the worried look he hates.

And then he’s back at school after the absence, and everyone’s staring at him while pretending not to, and whispering, or maybe he’s just imagining it, maybe he’s crazy, and… the bell rings and she’s waiting for him in the hallway outside his class. Just so they can walk to the cafeteria together, even though it would have been quicker for her to meet him there. And he loves her so much that he can’t say a word.

But then, as they grab their trays and look for an empty table, someone calls out, “Hey, Jules! Over here!”

Julia turns to the voice, smiling and waving. She turns back to Quentin. “That’s Stacy,” she says, like he doesn’t know who the student body president is. “I sat with them sometimes while you were — but we don’t have to,” she adds, in response to whatever she sees in his face. “We can go find another table, Q, it’s fine.”

“No, no — you go. It’s fine, I’m fine,” he stammers, because of course Julia belongs with the popular crowd. Type A smart-popular, not edgy-cool-popular, because those are different cliques, he thinks.

She gives him a look. “What, you think I’d just ditch you to hang out with them?”

“No, I mean —”

“You’re my best friend, Q. Don’t be such an idiot. I wouldn’t do that. But you know… they’re nice. If you want, why don’t you come with me? I promise, no one is going to give you a hard time.” And she waits, giving him time to answer.

Not everyone who is introverted, or mentally ill, or socially crippled, or whatever the fuck he is, is lucky enough to have a friend like Julia, he reminds himself. Maybe — since he can’t seem to find a balance between not wanting to be around people, and not wanting to feel alone all the time — he should take the hand she’s offering. Maybe he can fashion himself into something like a normal person, if she’s next to him.

He tries. But he’s him, and trying is not enough.

The thing is, she’s right. Nobody gives him a particularly hard time. Everyone at the table that day (and everyone at the dorm dinners and club meetings and parties that Julia will bring him along to in the years to come) likes _her_ , and that makes them willing to extend some positive overtures toward him too. He’s been bullied in the past, for being — how he is — but the older he gets, the less it’s like that. Oh, there’s the occasional fratboy dick and so on, but on the whole, people aren’t — they aren’t mean, they aren’t vicious, they aren’t bad. But that’s even worse, because it means _they_ are not the problem.

Quentin just doesn’t fit. He sits there and hopes no one notices him, but then they don’t, and it’s not even like he’s being ostracized — it’s just that he doesn’t exist.

At all these events, Julia comes back to check on him periodically; sometimes she’ll stay a while and they’ll talk, and he’ll feel like he has one thread that still links him to the world. But when people call to her, or come up to the two of them to pull her away, he tells her to go. It’s not fair, he thinks, that Julia — who is so brilliant, and beautiful, and funny, and brave — should be tethered to him, and not allowed to flourish in this world where she clearly belongs, just because she’s kind too.

So she goes, and every day a little further away. There’s school, and there’s James, who isn’t bad at all, really. He obviously loves Julia and is thinking about the long term, so befriending Quentin is a thing he genuinely tries to do, and even sort of succeeds at. Quentin, reluctantly, likes him. And he wants Julia to be happy, of course, because he loves her. The trouble is that everything that comes with that — the intensity, the resentment and anger and heartbreak, the obsessive quality of his love — has to go into something else, because to be like _that_ (feeling too much but being not enough) with someone who doesn’t reciprocate is creepy and generally unacceptable behavior.

So Quentin falls further into Fillory, his old refuge, just as Julia pulls away from it in favor of the real world. He brings his cards to the parties she throws, even when no one wants to watch. He checks himself into the hospital and doesn’t tell her, because he doesn’t want to find out that he’s finally managed to push her away like he hadn’t yet at sixteen. Because even now, with the distance that has grown between them, he doesn’t know what he would do without her hand reaching out to pull him into the world, or without her circling back to him from time to time, connecting him to life.

Then, magic is real. That changes everything.

 

**ii. Alice**

Well, everything except him. He’s still a colossal fuck up.

But first: magic is real. And he, Quentin Coldwater, has it. For one glorious moment, it seems like the problem _was_ the world, and now he’s finally in the right one. The one for him.

Soon enough, he’ll feel like an idiot for hoping, but maybe it’s not so stupid of him, for once.   Finding out magic is real when you’re the only one who’s believed in it, long past the socially acceptable time for that belief — come on, is there any way that doesn’t feel like a sign? Or waking up from a dream with a mysterious sigil burned into your palm, only to realize that the girl you’re drawn to, with whom you’ve had only brief, unsatisfying interactions thus far, was looking up that same symbol when you saw her last? That is some fantasy hero Chekhov’s gun destiny shit, right there.

And look, in retrospect, he knows he didn’t handle Julia’s situation perfectly. He gets caught up in the unfamiliar feeling of belonging (taken under the wing of Eliot and Margo, and feeling like he’s managed to make friends without trying; working on secret spells with Alice, who’s cool and reserved, but underneath that, intense and so powerful that when her gaze falls on him, he feels exhilarated and terrified in new and wonderful ways).

Quentin assumes that Julia doesn’t even remember magic, at first, and when James calls him and he realizes that she does, well —

He thinks about Julia, going off into the real world, back when they both thought that was all there was. The part of him that used to believe that if he just held tight to her hand, that he could be pulled out of himself — become someone different, someone he didn’t hate, someone who could live by her side in that world — well, that part is gone. He is what he is, just as he always has been. Love has never changed that. Quentin had to accept that difficult truth once upon a time; now it’s Julia’s turn.

Maybe Julia is what _she_ is. Maybe she belongs in the real world, the mundane world, and it’s not in his power to make her into something she’s not, just because he cares about her.

(He’s sorry not to share this experience with her. But somewhere, he can’t help but feel that she stopped sharing it with him a long time ago, by choice.)

By the time that Quentin finds out that Julia hasn’t accepted jack shit, and is in fact on a dangerous and dark path — there’s the Beast to think about, and the Trials, and his dad, and _Alice_. There’s this moment, when he thinks he’s going to be expelled, that he realizes he’s been a total dick to her… but then, not long after, there’s the time Julia uses magic to lock Quentin in his own head, possibly forever, and not in some pleasant fantasy, but — his worst nightmare, literally. Not even some random evil dream with violence and destruction, but actually, from the years and years she’s known him, the one she knows he would fear the most.

(Julia was his first friend, and his only friend for so long, and Quentin can’t just cut her out of himself, not really. But he also doesn’t want to think about her, for a while. Given the shitshow his life has turned into, it’s easy to tuck everything he feels about her away, and focus on the problems at hand.)

*****

Magic isn’t what he thought it would be. It hasn’t made him into someone else any more than Julia could have done by dragging him out to dinners and parties. He’s a middling magician at best, and he still feels like a waste of space in this new reality he inhabits. Standing naked and painted and drunk on a roof with Alice, he says, “I’m still this person that I fucking hate.” Lays the truth of himself bare, magic or no magic.

In turn, Alice tells him how she fears what she’s capable of. How she always holds back. They’re not exactly compatible truths, his and hers, but they’re not fundamentally incompatible either, just distinct from one another. They see the world in different ways, they believe in different things, but —

He saves her from the thing that used to be her brother, when she wouldn’t stop and save herself. Furious and hateful, she asks, “Why did you think you had to save me?” But it was never a question for him. He could never have done anything else. That’s not who he is.

And just when he thinks he’s lost her, that she’ll never forgive him for what he took from her — he’s caught off guard by her generosity and her kindness, the way she reaches out to him after he finds out about his dad, and genuinely seems to care about how Quentin is coping.

He doesn’t know what to make of it. He does know that if they went back to the night that he boxed Charlie’s niffin, he would do the exact same thing again. And despite the way she seems to have forgiven him, he knows that she would do the exact same thing too. Alice, who fears what she’s capable of, but wants to find out, who wants to push the boundaries of magic, who loved her brother absolutely — if there were even the slightest chance she could succeed, she would never stop. That’s who _she_ is.

There’s something troubling about the dissonance between them, but —

There has to be a reason, Quentin thinks, that he’s so drawn to her, and she to him, despite their differences. Because it’s magnetic and dizzying, this pull between them. When they’re foxes, it’s simple, and when they’re human too, for a little while — and then Alice pulls back, citing stress and circumstances and pheromones, even though Quentin _knows_ what they’re feeling is real — but then Penny’s in the infirmary and Mike, Eliot’s Mike, is responsible — and Alice comes back, because she’s afraid for Quentin, because it’s real — they’re real.

(She asks, when they first get back from Brakebills South, “Are you in love with me?” He says, “I don’t know,” but it’s not for long. He does. He knows he’s bound to her, in some inexplicable way. And he’s happy.)

Of course, insecurity rears its ugly head. He really, truly does not know why Alice likes him. How she could even consider loving him. She’s so much better than him, capable of doing so much more.

Always surprising him, she says, “I don’t think we’re supposed to like people for what they’re good at. I think that’s something we make up to torture ourselves.” She likes him, she confesses, “in the weirdest way.” Loves him, even, for reasons she can’t explain. And maybe, he thinks in a shock of joy, _like_ and _love_ are things that don’t need a _how_ and _why_.

Quentin used to think that love was what could make you better: that with Julia by his side, he could find his way to normal, to fitting in, to doing right. With Alice, he realizes that maybe he can be who he is, and she can be who she is. They don’t have to change each other to love each other. She knows he’s a fuck up, and loves him anyway, in spite of all his failings and faults, all the things he can’t do. Maybe, just maybe, with that in mind, he can make this work.

*****

He fucks it up.

*****

Before _that_ night, however, the first time they bottle their emotions and then gulp them down again, Alice says the words she couldn’t quite voice until now. They burst out of her, frantic, like she’s been holding them back her whole life and this is her last chance — “I love you so much.”

Quentin, in the throes of a panic attack, hardly hears her. He’s feeling overwhelmingly, terrifyingly alone.

They’re both irritable the next morning, courtesy of the emotion hangover. And then Alice thinks it’s a better idea to learn battle magic without the shortcut, even though it might take ten years.

Alice could do it, he has no doubt. But she forgets that not everyone is as phenomenally talented at magic as she is, and they have to account for the least common denominator. They’re all in it together, but then there’s Alice: stronger, faster, better, charging ahead.

(He repeats it to himself: she doesn’t love him for what he’s _good at_. But all the same, Quentin thinks, she’s good at everything and he’s not good at much.)

He uses the bottle. She doesn’t.

*****

About that night: Quentin knows he was in the wrong. He admits it. But, “I was out of my mind. I made a mistake. And you aimed a weapon.”

She doesn’t capitulate. She says, “I’m glad it hurt. It should hurt.”

*****

When she says, unbending a little, “You’re not as good as I hoped you would be, but you’re not as bad as you think,” her unexpected generosity hurts even worse.

(And underneath the guilt, a part of him realizes that it doesn’t matter what she said before, when it sounded like she loved him as he was. Maybe that was her generosity and her kindness speaking. He loves her for it. But he was never enough for her love. He isn’t good enough to be.)

*****

He’s not the hero of this story. He’s the fool. The one who hoped that Fillory was real, and that despite everything, he could be its savior. Hoped that someone like Alice Quinn could love him, just as he was. And maybe she was willing to try, but he fucked it up and showed her exactly why he didn’t deserve her.

Sometimes, he thinks, it _does_ come down to what you’re good at, and what you can do. Even within the confines of love.

Quentin isn’t good at much. Holding the disgusting power of a god in his hands, he knows, intuitively, that he doesn’t deserve it either. Of all of them, Alice is the one most equipped to take that much magic on, and defeat a beast. If all he can do is to give her that power, and give her his faith, well. Believing he can do.

Like Charlie before her, the magic is too much for Alice. But she doesn’t stop. She wouldn’t be herself if she did. And then — well, she’s not herself anymore.

Quentin thinks, as the thing that was Alice comes after him, it’s fine. If this is how it happens, he is ready to die.

But then — she goes for Eliot. And Margo. And there is only one thing he can do. (He hates himself for it, but he knows he would make the same choice, every time.)

*****

When Alice is gone, and the White Lady offers to take away his sadness, Quentin refuses. He owes it to Alice to feel this.

He doesn’t know what would have happened if she had lived. She had a capacity for forgiveness, he remembers discovering, that you wouldn’t expect just by looking at her. Maybe she could have forgiven him for — that night, the Eliot-and-Margo thing. Maybe she could have forgiven him for killing her to save them, when he wouldn’t do it to save himself. But even if she never forgave him, and he never got to be with her in the same way again, he wishes she could live. That she could go on, being Alice.

*****

“You have to stop,” Eliot had said that day, over and over again, holding Quentin tight. But Quentin can’t stop loving Alice, and he can’t stop feeling this grief.

It would be a betrayal, he thinks, of their love.

Quentin doesn’t stop. He tries to keep his slippery grasp on the revelatory feeling he had, that night she said, “I don’t think we’re supposed to like people for what they’re good at,” when unspoken, he had heard, “I like you for who you are. Even if I don’t understand why. Even if we disagree. Even if we make mistakes.”

The least he can do is love her the way she tried to love him. She deserves that, even if he didn’t.

So he loves her when she comes back as something else, malevolent and chained and furious.

Loves her while he holds her captive within himself, searching desperately for a way to bring her back to who she was.

Loves her enough to let her niffin roam free in the world, when he can’t see another way out.

Loves her enough to keep hoping, to find the solution, to perform dangerously exacting magic and reunite her with her shade.

And then, he manages it. She’s back. _He saved her_. And she hates him for it.

(Quentin would do it again, he knows. No matter what she feels about it.)

Alice, the girl who never knew what she was capable of, who was always holding back, finally got to stretch her wings and fly free in the stratosphere. Now, crammed in this limited vessel, everything she learned fading (except the knowledge that _she used to know more_ ), she feels strangled.

When Quentin loses magic for the world, Alice is so desperate for it that she’s willing to take Julia’s, even if it kills her. But when he sets off on the great quest to restore magic for good, she’s reluctant to join, weighed down by the guilt of the unscrupulous things she did when she lived without her shade. And then, even when she offers to help — it hurts him to think it, but he doesn’t trust her.

Quentin doesn’t understand her. Maybe he never did, but now — he doesn’t even _recognize_ her. He tries. The way he loved her — unconditionally, inexplicably, in spite of their differences — he tries to pour it into this new version of her, the one he is partially responsible for creating, thinking maybe their love will be strong enough to draw her back into herself. They’re still bound together, after all. He gave her the power to fight Martin. He released the cacodemon he thought killed her. He let her niffin go do the things that alternatively torment and titillate her now. And he brought her back.

Quentin tries. Quentin hopes. But it’s not enough. Alice has changed, and with her, the pull between them, magnetic, has reversed its polarity: instead of being drawn together, they’re both left pushing in opposite directions. The things that never used to matter — the fundamental ways they’re different, their disagreements, the way they can never change the other’s mind — matter now. You can love someone even when you don’t agree with them, but — Quentin and Alice don’t know how to compromise, or capitulate. They never learned to meet in the middle.

And the part of him that so desperately believed, that night she said — _I don’t think we like people for what they’re good at_ — the part that thought he could be enough, because someone loved him for something more intrinsic than his failings, his weaknesses, his mistakes — it doesn’t have any place here, with this new Alice.

So he tucks it away, and throws himself into something else. He can’t fix Alice, or help her get back to what she was (what they were). She doesn’t even want him to. But maybe, just maybe, he can fix magic.

(He’s still hoping. Still a fool.)

 

**iii. Eliot**

So the thing with Eliot is — different.

Quentin loved Julia as a friend first, and then as more than that; he tried to repress the other feelings to save what he had, and in spite of that, the whole thing ended up exploding in his face. But they were friends first, and they’re friends now. The other stuff just dissipated in the explosion, he thinks, and they’re better off for it.

He was friends with Alice too, but they fell into everything so quickly that he never really learned what it would look like to have her as a friend, but not a lover. They were a whirlwind, everything entangled. And when he lost her (every time he lost her), he lost both.

Eliot is his friend. And Eliot is —

It’s not like it was with Julia — when there was a line Quentin knew he would never cross, even if he wished he could at the time. Not like with Alice, when the line was in the rearview mirror almost before they even started.

A line isn’t enough to describe it. The thing with Eliot has more dimensions. They’re friends, and then there’s something within that friendship, or surrounding it, that it’s impossible to look at directly or for too long — it’s like staring into the sun. Quentin knows that it’s there, and that it’s warm, and it’s bright, but he lets it be, and so does Eliot. It’s funny, because they’re both objectively shit at self-preservation as a general rule, but they both respect the sanctity of this thing. Maybe because they’re afraid of being blinded or burned. Maybe because they’re so desperate not to lose it.

So they’re friends. Quentin doesn’t really have any reason to think about what he _felt_ the first time he saw Eliot, lounging on that wall, the day his life changed forever. He can remember, factually, that Eliot was both attractive and really — extra. Everyone knows that. After a few days’ acquaintance, in the direst of circumstances, Eliot can offer, quite casually, to seduce him, and Quentin can, quite readily, assent. It’s a joke. It’s a comfort. Together, they let it drop, and together, they move on.

Then there’s Alice (and a whole lot more magical violence and drama) to distract him, and well, Eliot’s still there. They’re still friends. And if, sometimes, when they touch (all innocent — a hand in passing tweaking his hair, a companionable arm wrapped around his shoulders), Quentin feels the buoyancy or the weight of this indefinable thing, it’s easy enough to acknowledge its presence and move on.

But then, that night.

Later, his mind tends to glide right over that night, and straight into the mess of the morning after. When he thinks about it at all, it is the night that ruined things with Alice. The time he (admitting his fault) cheated on her. With Margo. (And with Eliot.) The time he (making excuses) was high on emotions, and drunk, and out of his mind.

It’s true that, like Margo, he doesn’t remember much of the… transgression itself. That’s good, because it makes it easy to dismiss as a mistake, straight away, no question: for a long time, it’s just an aberration in the narrative of his love for Alice. But —

The last thing he remembers clearly is sitting with Eliot by the fireplace, talking about Chatwin’s Torrent — idly thinking that of course he, Quentin, could talk about Fillory at any time, in any condition, no matter how fucked up he was on emotions or wine or whatever, but that it was curious for Eliot to dredge up a reference like that in his current state —

He remembers, a little blurry, sharing the conversation with Margo afterward, because she was the person who knew Eliot better than anyone else, and she would understand. Remembers the way she said, “I’ve never loved anything like that,” which was blatantly untrue, since they were lying next to the person she did love, pure and simple — and how she acknowledged it when she said, “Maybe Fillory can fix him. Because he’s really not okay and he just _doesn’t care_ ,” like it hurt her to care so much.

And blurrier still: how, at that _doesn’t care_ , Quentin’s mind caught on something he couldn’t quite grasp in his addled state — that maybe Eliot _did_ care, and that’s _why_ he was talking about the spring, and maybe he just didn’t know how to talk about all the things wrong with him, and so he settled on liver disease as something that could be laughed off with another glass of wine. That maybe Eliot _wasn’t_ okay, and a part of him knew that, and wanted to fix it, but his life hadn’t taught him how to reach out for help — or worse, it had taught him that reaching out would end up hurting him more.

He has to tell Margo, he thinks, but the words won’t come, and then they’re reaching for each other in the hurt and they’re kissing and then Eliot sits up and then —

So, mostly Quentin focuses on the incredible guilt and misery that followed that night.

In the morning, all of them are islands in the same room (he, Alice, Margo, Eliot), unable to connect when they most need to be united (except maybe Eliot and Margo are their own island, together, he thinks angrily, and _their_ lives weren’t ruined by this). By light of day, it’s easy to lash out at Margo, who sidesteps Alice’s feelings and her own culpability neatly, like it’s all just a matter of other people’s oversensitivity. And then, even though he can hardly bear to glance at him, to snap at Eliot, for making — what happened, what they did — feel small, and unimportant.

(“It’s not funny. And it’s not a joke.”

“But it truly is, Quentin.” With such a smirk.)

Deep down, even when he can’t look at them directly, a part of him sees that — for all their apparent solidarity and indifference — Eliot and Margo are troubled, too. And they’re his friends, and they all did this together, and maybe they should talk about it. But he’s furious, and he’s lost Alice, and they’re really not the point, right now.

Penny’s saying, “Don’t fall in. Don’t get lost,” and he’s talking about the fountains in the Neitherlands, but —

(Through a haze of smoke, like the one obscuring Eliot in the windowsill, a fragment comes back to him: a momentary flash of heat — blazing, unbearable — the tipping point of wanting-desperation into having-connection — and washing over all, something radiant and powerful that whites everything else out, leaving in its wake a memory that can only be sepia-toned.)

— Quentin thinks he fell in, last night. He got lost in that thing between them, the one that they never, ever touch. For good reason, it seems: now he’s lost Alice (and maybe, his mind whispers, he’s lost Eliot too).

*****

He doesn’t lose Eliot. He loses Alice, again and again and again, in various ways, but in the end, he and Eliot — Quentin’s not fine, not for a long time, but he and Eliot are fine.

This is how it goes: they’re going to Fillory. Of course, Quentin falls through a fountain and has to work his way back by making up with Julia, of all things. He finds his friends, and… it’s a bit of a mess. Margo hates Julia. Alice is rightfully furious with him. Eliot is chosen to be High King (which makes either a lot of sense or none at all, depending on how you squint) and marries a knifemaker’s daughter (which doesn’t make sense no matter which way you look at it). They’re all on a mission to rid the world of the Beast.

They don’t really do that well, the first time. And then Julia has her own agenda, which angers everyone else, but Quentin can hardly blame her, not with what she’s been through, and once he sees that Alice and Eliot and Margo and Penny are all alive and well again, more or less.

Then, the coronation ceremony: a peaceful interlude that they all need, creating a fragile détente.

Quentin knows he was angry, but he can’t find the anger when he stands there in front of Eliot, crowning him High King. Eliot, willing to marry a stranger and stay in a land he hardly even believed in, just because he took a blood test and watched _Dirty Dancing_ too many times. Eliot the spectacular, Eliot with the shining look in his eyes — the one Quentin hadn’t realized he was missing, all the weeks and months that Eliot was in his downward spiral and Quentin had problems of his own. Eliot, who apologizes to Alice for betraying her, and in such a way that even she, so wronged, responds to his obvious sincerity.

By the time Margo apologizes to Quentin, for her part in ruining something good for him, Quentin is disappointed with himself, for what he did to Alice, but the anger is gone. They’re in this together, no matter what has happened in the past.

And then it’s time to leave Eliot in the castle, and —

Eliot has this way about him: he can be dramatic about the little things, blow them way out of proportion, but he makes the big things seem little, like they can be shrugged or laughed off, smoothed over with the right cocktail in hand.

He says, “Ready? Good,” and tells Quentin about killing somebody to make him feel less alone, days after their first meeting. About to be abandoned in Fillory, he commits himself to learning kingship and surviving a marriage of enforced fidelity, to a woman at that, and bemoans the lack of champagne like it’s the greatest travesty of his current situation.

Sometimes this tendency of his hurts, like it did the morning after — that night, when Quentin was reeling and Eliot just brushed it off, made it small. But sometimes, like now, it makes it possible to face an impossible situation with some measure of comfort.

That’s why he does it, Quentin realizes. Because Eliot is the sort of person who does what has to be done. Maybe he doesn’t do it fierce and angry, guns blazing, like Margo, or quiet, intense, unstoppable like Alice, but — like it doesn’t matter. He gets it done; he breaks off pieces of himself for his friends, and more than that, for a world to which he doesn’t have any obligation, with a sort of beautiful insouciance, like nothing could ever touch him.

Maybe there was a little part of Quentin that worried, when he came to find Eliot alone, that things would be awkward with the specter of _that night_ hanging over them. But of course, Eliot is Eliot, and with everything that has happened, Quentin is grateful for that, for their easy friendship. That Eliot can ask for a hug, like physical contact won’t touch anything that matters between them. That he can joke about an ass squeeze a few days after that night, for fuck’s sake, like their relationship just transcends inappropriateness or awkwardness. And well, it does. It does. Quentin is just so happy to have Eliot in his life, he thinks, and he pours it into the hug, holds on tight, laughs like he hasn’t laughed in so long.

As he leaves Eliot in Fillory for the foreseeable future, Quentin says, “Thank you,” not “sorry.” It seems more appropriate to honor the bravery of Eliot’s sacrifice than offer him pity he won’t accept.

(It doesn’t occur to Quentin at the time, but Eliot never apologizes to him either, for that night, the way he did to Alice, or Margo did to Quentin. They never talk about it, the two of them, after that single exchange on the awful morning after. Together, they let it drop, and together, they move on.)

*****

They don’t actually spend much time together over the next few weeks and months, truth be told. Quentin is recovering, and then mourning, and then struggling to save Alice from herself. He sees Eliot and Margo once in a while, mostly when shit hits the fan, but he feels like he’s in a fog for a lot of it.

And then there’s the quest of the seven keys, and despite how generally fucked they all are, Quentin feels more like himself than he has in a while, working to fix what he broke. When Eliot somehow bursts into the Cottage like he’s running for his life, wife and — daughter?! — in tow, Quentin realizes, viscerally, how much he has missed. It’s like he’s awakening from this fog he’s been living in, cold and muted, through which nothing has felt real except for Alice. But now —

(In Brakebills South, before the loss of magic, he remembers confessing to Eliot, “I think I destroyed her.” Even the light there wasn’t bright: everything gray and deadened and quiet, and the whole memory remains like that now. But through the fog, he recalls Eliot being strangely serious, and kind. Sharing his own strength, and his strategy: you do what needs to be done, no matter how you feel, or how much it sucks, because you’re _needed_. How he had known to invoke the one thing that had always saved Quentin from himself before: Fillory.)

Now, listening to Eliot in some kind of shock state, describing cannibals, and how his greatest fear, manifested by one of the keys to all magic, was his _father_ — seeing the helpless and uncharacteristically open little smile on his face when he says, “It was cathartic” —

At first, Quentin is too horrified at the prospect of _feeding your own father to cannibals_ to consider the rest of the story, but then he realizes — he doesn’t know anything about Eliot’s father, or his childhood. Eliot shared a single snippet about being bullied as a kid (to make _Quentin_ feel better), but he has never, as far as Quentin knows, talked about his past to unburden _himself_. He seems to exist as he is, like he’s always been this way — perfect and untouchable. Except this key, which drew upon his deepest fear, found something Eliot _seemed_ to have shrugged off long ago, something vital enough that Eliot is talking about it now.

It’s easy for Quentin not to talk about these things with Eliot. Because he and Eliot are always fine. That certainty, bone-deep, is important to both of them, so much so that they don’t often disturb it with probing and painful conversations. But — perhaps that makes it easy to take what they have for granted, too. Eliot, after all, has always been there whenever Quentin needed reassurance, or solidarity, or a gently comforting quip. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it, because that’s not his way, but — maybe Quentin needs to do better by Eliot. Reach out, even when it seems like he doesn’t want a hand. Maybe Eliot will be Eliot, and just laugh off any attempts to delve deeper. But maybe —

It wasn’t wrong to let himself grieve Alice, Quentin thinks. But he can do better now. He crowned High King Eliot, told him he believed in him, and then he just disappeared.  Eliot had Margo, of course. Quentin couldn’t have been Margo for him, and Margo was always what Eliot needed. But Quentin can be —

Strangely serendipitous, just as Quentin is resolving the shape of these things in his own mind, here comes an opportunity to realize them: the next key quest, just the two of them. They’re about to step through the clock, but then — they’ve already done it. Or never needed to. Or something.

Well, Quentin thinks, resigned, maybe it’s a sign. After all, doesn’t this perfectly exemplify his relationship with Eliot? They can apparently complete a quest to save magic together, and not just any quest, but the one with the unsolvable mosaic representing _the beauty of all life_ , and not even remember it. It’s just another dimension of their bizarre connection, which never quite finds its way into the open. This facet of it gets relegated to an alternate timeline, for fuck’s sake.

So they don’t have to think or talk about it, like everything else that lives and breathes between them. It’s all just there. Warm and bright and good, like it’s always been. And it’s enough just to know that it exists, Quentin reminds himself. They don’t _have_ to explore it further, no matter that he, tentatively, fiercely, _wanted_ to. Maybe this is the way he and Eliot are supposed to be, forever on the beautiful surface of this unfathomably deep thing.

Except. Then they remember.

*****

Before, if someone had asked each of them if they loved the other, Quentin would have said, “Of course,” matter-of-fact, no question about it, even though he had never considered it in those terms. Obviously he loved Eliot. Eliot would probably have rolled his eyes and failed to answer on principle, or brushed it off with a casual affirmative, depending on his mood, but Quentin would have known the truth regardless, with a kind of certainty reserved within himself for all things Eliot, and nothing else.

It’s that same certainty that hits Quentin now, as he sits with his back to Margo’s wedding altar, casting its light deeper than before. Oh, Quentin thinks, I was _in love_ with Eliot. Not just in Fillory past, but — have they been, this whole time? From that first moment he saw Eliot and discovered magic, almost in the same breath? Or —

No, not exactly. But they might have been. The thing is, they have been too content with how things are, or too afraid, to explore what they _could_ be, together, if they really tried. They left the possibility alone, by unspoken agreement. They left each other free to find others, knowing that _they_ would always be there to return to, for safety, and solace, and friendship. They might have stayed like that forever, and it would have been good.

But Quentin remembers feeling, either yesterday or fifty years ago, before they went through that clock, or didn’t — he remembers thinking that maybe it was time to reach out and _try_ , with Eliot. He remembers hoping (so quietly that he couldn’t even shape the words in his own mind) that what they might find beneath the surface of themselves, if they dared, was even better than what they already had.

And you know what? It _was_.

He’s a little confused, what with fifty years of memories crashing down on him like an avalanche: overwhelmed by the rush of feeling, details melting fast. It’s like trying to hold to the sights and sounds of an impossibly convoluted dream, knows he can’t, yet can’t help but try, but amidst it all, Quentin knows one truth.

He and Eliot built a life together, and he _didn’t fuck it up_.

Quentin doesn’t remember it step-by-step, like a how-to manual, but he knows, absolutely, that they _worked_. They _fit_. Not in _spite_ of themselves, but _because_ of themselves. Not because they tried to change each other, necessarily, but because they did, naturally, change together, and grow together.

And yes, objectively, adding fifty more years of odds and ends, bits and pieces, into his already fucked up psyche is probably not likely to make the thing any less fucked up, but maybe that doesn’t _matter_.

Maybe we’re not meant to be whole on our own, he thinks. Maybe we’re supposed to be fucked up. Maybe the way he’s splintered and patched himself, jagged edges and all, is what makes him the perfect fit for someone else who is broken too, but along different faultlines — someone who sealed the cracks with clothes and panache and flippancy, forming a façade so beautiful and untouchable he seems complete in himself, at least at first. But underneath all that, Quentin _knows_ there is a space carved out of Eliot for him, for _Quentin_ , and for all that they could be together.

With everything in him, Quentin knows that he couldn’t have solved the mosaic with anyone else besides Eliot. Because the beauty of all life — it’s messy. Deep. Unshakable. A little frightening. Warm and bright. Everything that’s existed between them, around them, within them — this connection, so immediate and easy, which they’ve never dared to explore in this world or time —

This is what they discovered on this quest: that the possibility between them, the potential that they’ve always had, didn’t cease to deepen or grow just because they refused to look at it. And, in Fillory past, they found their way into it. They know it. They _lived_ it. They had the answer, and maybe it’s slipping from them now, but they have only to look within themselves to build it again.

So, why the fuck not?

Despite everything, depressed, unremarkable Quentin Coldwater, the one who wasn’t chosen but just kept coming back anyway, who doesn’t give up, who _believes_ in magic, still dares to hope. This time, he has proof of concept to back it up. He knows, with certainty, that this is the time he reaches out and —

But then — “not when we have a choice.”

Okay. Okay.

*****

So. They’re still friends.

He tells himself it’s okay. He hasn’t actually lost anything he ever truly had.

Eliot loves him. He’s still recognizably Eliot, he changes not a smidge of his behavior — still warm and tactile and solid underneath all that frippery and snark, when he holds Quentin close and pecks the top of his head and sends him off on the next stage of this quest. (Like the fifty years they lived out together were just one insignificant leg of a journey, like he’s content to be replaced by Quentin’s next “life partner,” like it didn’t change anything or mean anything at all.)

It’s still easy between them, like it always has been. Maybe it hurts more than it ought, maybe it feels like there’s something missing, but — there’s the fate of magic to think about, right now. The old solution: time to throw himself into it again.

Onward. Next key. Let’s go.

*****

How fortunate that the next stage of the quest involves a key that makes the bearer fight himself, all the worst and darkest voices within his own head. Quentin has been waging that battle for years.

He has never really stopped. Depression, at least his experience of it, isn’t something that vanishes without a trace, cured for good. It’s more like — sometimes the voices get quiet, fade to whispers, and they can be ignored, at least for a while. When he’s happy, or on his medications, or not even happy, but just focused on something more important, he can live with that background noise. And he can even hope that, one day, he’ll look up from what he’s doing and the voices _will_ be gone.

So he is actually well equipped for this, as much as anyone could be. But this time, the voices are turned up loud.

Quentin has never really stopped fighting the depression, that’s true. But it’s also true (screams his mind) that when it’s bad, he _wants_ to stop. He wants to give up the fight. He can’t find the hope.

But even then — he is the person who checks himself into the hospital, he reminds himself. Even when it feels like he’s beyond help, he reaches out anyway, and tries for one more day. And then another. And then another. Until something does help. Until he gets back to the place where his broken brain can function, and he can hope again. (One of his doctors, early on, when he listlessly described this process to her, said, “That takes strength, Quentin, and a lot of courage. And you _are_ strong.”)

It doesn’t feel like strength, when you’re in it. It feels more like what Jane Chatwin was talking about: like he’s the volunteer to-mah-to, whatever the fuck that means, and his defining characteristic is persistence in the face of futility. And what is the point of going on persisting, persisting? (But — the doctor’s voice is in his head too, alongside the rest of them. Maybe he just can’t feel it now, he reminds himself, but he _is_ strong enough to beat this.)

Every time he has hoped, and loved, he has failed. He wasn’t enough for Julia, and he failed her. He wasn’t enough for Alice, and he failed her. And Eliot — no, he _didn’t_ fail Eliot, Quentin thinks loudly. That other life, the one that never happened, all the things that Eliot doesn’t want from him — it wasn’t _real_. He and Eliot are fine. What they have _is_ enough. (He clings to this belief, even as something else in him insists, _but it’s not the same_.)

Quentin hasn’t failed magic, not yet. It’s not over yet.

No psych wards to check into here, so. He ties himself to the mast.

*****

Quentin has to check himself sometimes: his enthusiasm, the way he loves. He’s all heart, all in. And he has learned the hard way that people don’t really want that from him.

Every time it’s happened, and he’s had to channel himself into something else, it’s been magic. First, Fillory and the dream of it, and then — real magic. And maybe Fillory is tremendously disappointing, and magic can be destructive and painful, but they’ve both saved his life. What for, if not so that he can save them in turn?

As they near the end of the quest, and someone has to stay in Blackspire, of course it’s going to be him. Maybe this is what his whole life has been leading up to.

Quentin thinks, this is what I’m needed for. (This is the only thing anyone needs him for.)

Julia, his first and best friend, a literal goddess now: if she ever needed him for anything, she definitely doesn’t anymore.

Alice, the heroine of his story, his fairytale love: they were never good for each other, but they’re at peace, going their separate ways. She won’t even remember magic. It’s nice of her to say she’ll regret not remembering him, but — when did she want or need anything he tried to give her, anyway?

Eliot —

His thoughts stutter a bit, but he continues, determined. Eliot will be fine. Eliot is always fine. They’re friends, sure, but he doesn’t _need_ Quentin. He _had_ Quentin, on offer, and he didn’t even want him, not that way. That life in Fillory past — the feeling of wholeness, and togetherness, and _everything_ (he lets himself think it, just this once) — Eliot doesn’t feel the loss of that, not the way Quentin does. Maybe Eliot will be sad, but _this_ loss won’t break him, irrevocably. Not if that one didn’t.

Magic will be back, and everyone accounted for. Quentin can give his life over to a monster, for that.

*****

Everyone, it turns out, is not accounted for.

Alice betrays them. It’s not enough for her to forget magic. She wants to destroy it.

Julia returns to them. She, with the power to create new worlds, comes back to this one, to save magic, and her friends.

And Eliot shoots the monster in the face. For him. What?

*****

Then, Eliot is possessed by said monster. Because of course he is.

(Is this, Quentin wonders, what Alice felt like, when Quentin kept trying to save her from herself, against her will? Quentin made his choice, and Eliot negated it with a single action. But — how do you hate someone for trying to save you? How do you hate them when they paid such a price for what they did? Or more simply, how could Quentin ever hate Eliot? He can’t. He can be mad later, he decides, but that’s secondary to getting Eliot back.)

Then, Eliot is dead.

(What’s the point? What is the fucking _point_? Quentin lives one day. Then another. Then another. He wants to stop, but he doesn’t. Why? For the first time, it’s not magic, or Fillory, his old saviors: what do they matter, without Eliot? It’s not Alice, trying to make amends, or Julia, trying to hide the old worried look in her eyes. He knows they’re there for him, but he doesn’t really care. He doesn’t have hope. What he has is one overriding certainty: Quentin will rid the world of this monster. He will live to see a day when this thing can no longer inhabit Eliot’s body, or make expressions with Eliot’s face. Then, maybe Quentin can stop fighting.)

Then, Eliot breaks through and steps forward. Quentin, used to holding himself still for the monster’s touch, forcing himself, painfully, to look at this face and those eyes and see _not-Eliot_ , hesitates to believe, but then —

Of course he believes it. One little spark and his _hope_ — the awful defining persistent thing that he thought had finally died with Eliot — is alight again, full blaze. He thought he was done with this business of going out on a limb, reaching out for happiness, only to be left hanging, broken and alone. But despite everything, he’s still such a fool.

He steps forward too and —

Eliot is gone. All Quentin has is his body, possessed by a monster. And fuck. Hope.

*****

The truth is, hope has never served Quentin well. It gives him his purpose back, gives him a reason to survive (save Eliot, save Eliot, save Eliot), which is necessary, he supposes. But beyond that, it doesn’t seem to have a role in the grim reality he occupies.

(Every time he has hoped, he has failed. And he can’t fail this most important thing. He won’t fail Eliot.)

So this time, he locks the hope away. Dissociates it from the goal (save Eliot). He stays numb and he stays strong. Tries to focus on the task at hand. It’s hard, and everything he’s feeling claws at him, but —

Quentin thinks about the way Eliot looked when they first met, layered and buttoned and so perfectly immaculate that everything about him was a temptation: the way he loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, unbuttoned one button; the sinful way a lock of stray hair fell into his face — probably styled to do so, but giving him an air of careless debauchery. He imagines Eliot constructing those layers, one at a time, until they became a part of him, until he could hold the illusion without the external trappings, until it _was_ Eliot — even first thing in the morning hung over before coffee, or drunk and naked in bed at night.

Even grieving for the boyfriend who tried to kill them all, who Eliot had to kill himself, for fuck’s sake. Quentin knows Eliot must have been suffering then, but even at his worst — disheveled, drunk, high — it was such a towering performance. You couldn’t reach out and give him a hug and tell him to have a good cry any more than you would reach out to Hamlet soliloquizing on stage. It’s like he thought (Quentin realizes now) if he performed his grief loudly enough, it would become an act too, and he would cease to feel it.

Margo saw through it, perhaps. Quentin was a bit preoccupied at the time. Except for that night, _the_ night, when they talked about Chatwin’s Torrent and he thought he saw —

Now, Quentin decides: all the pieces that don’t work, that don’t help — just tuck them away. Hasn’t he done it before? Like bottling your emotions allows you to do battle magic; like losing your shade makes you the sort of person who can do the things that have to be done. Who cares what happens after? (Save Eliot.) You don’t need something as visible as a vial around your neck or a hole in your torso. You can bury these useless misfit parts of yourself deep, build layers and layers of stone around them, so no one and nothing can ever use them against you.

Quentin has broken and Quentin has rebuilt himself, again and again and again. He knows how to do it now. Maybe he will never be able to create beauty out of the pieces of himself the way Eliot did when he created his perfect façade, but Quentin knows how to build ugly, build silent, build numb.

*****

They get him back.

Quentin is… relieved? He’s happy, he thinks, but actually what he feels is more tired than anything. The other emotions are far away, and he knows they should be there, but he can’t access them right now. He doesn’t see the need to. It doesn’t really bother him, truth be told. Nothing really bothers him lately. It’s nice.

Oddly, though, when he sees Margo helping Eliot to his feet, the two of them valiantly reaching for their usual banter, trying to establish some normalcy through their tears — he feels a little shaken, like the sight of Eliot’s first smile post-monster (small, but real, and of course for Margo) is something to be afraid of. But maybe this kind of inappropriate response is to be expected, going through something like this and coming out on the other end.

He doesn’t follow them to the bathroom. He doesn’t help Margo set out clothes, or help Eliot into the shower. He clasps Eliot’s shoulder. He smiles. He says good night.

(Right now, Quentin isn’t thinking about the night they talked about Chatwin’s Torrent anymore. He isn’t remembering the moment that struck him, even in his inebriated state, as so terribly important. How he realized that some small part of Eliot, broken and hurt, _wanted_ to reach out and ask for help — ask Quentin — and couldn’t quite manage it from underneath all those carefully crafted layers of perfection. And how Quentin thought that maybe this was the part of Eliot that had _built_ the façade, long ago, and now lived buried under it. And maybe it was still yearning, paradoxically, for someone to find and unearth it.

Quentin isn’t thinking about what might be living, stifled, under the walls he’s built for himself, which he modeled after Eliot’s but made his own. He doesn’t feel it at all.)

*****

Eliot doesn’t ramble, really, not like Quentin does. When he’s nervous, his speech gets a little pressured, his zings a bit sharper, his voice infused with a touch of hysteria perhaps, but he doesn’t stutter and stammer and stop and restart. Not usually.

So when he finds Quentin alone one day, and fumbles his way awkwardly through a story about how he broke through the monster’s possession, involving peaches and plums and confessions, winding up with —

“Maybe, if you still want to, we could give it a shot?”

— Quentin knows, intellectually, that this brand of hesitation coming from Eliot means something. The last time he heard it…

Almost a decade into the life they never lived, when Arielle died, and Eliot was the only thing holding the pieces of Quentin together in some recognizable form, and Teddy was crying and wouldn’t go to sleep without Arielle’s bedtime song, Quentin lost it, not for the first time and definitely not for the last. Lost whatever stability and sense of belonging he had gained out of this experience.

“I’m being a shitty father, El. I know I am, but I don’t think I can do this. He’s my whole life, he’s everything, but I don’t know how to do this without her. I’m a fucking wreck.” And then, panic spiraling down old paths: “We’re on a fucking quest to save magic! What if we just disappear some day and he’s left alone? Who does that? Who brings a child into the world knowing that… what kind of failure of a father am I? I can’t even sing.” Bizarrely, that’s the straw that sends Quentin off into tears again, which certainly doesn’t help Teddy’s hiccupping abandoned sobs in the cot three feet away.

They’re in the world’s most awkward embrace: facing each other, knees touching, in two rickety wooden chairs on the same side of the rickety wooden table. At some point, Quentin has given up the fight against gravity and tipped forward to hide his face in Eliot’s chest, even though it’s an uncomfortable stretch, sitting like this. He’s learned that Eliot never turns you away, physically. He’ll bypass conversations — push back with a quip or a distraction; suggest very reasonably that you save your overthinking for the quest you’re on, for example, or point out very supportively that if _he_ had a lovely red-haired Fillorian girl making eyes like that at _him_ , _and_ if he weren’t constitutionally incapable of loving any woman short of Margo, he would go for it, Q. That’s how he turns you away. But if you lean into him with your body, he’ll wrap his arms around you and hold tight until you pull away yourself.

This time, however, Eliot disentangles himself first, rising from the chair with a squeeze of Quentin’s shoulders, leaving Quentin to sag forward like the useless fucking bag of bones he is. Even Eliot can’t take me anymore, he thinks, tearless now, all cried out. Failed at being a father, failed at this quest, failed Arielle, failed Eliot, who’s the only one left to carry around all Quentin’s weight. He wishes there were taller buildings here, so that he could just keep leaning forward and let gravity carry him down.

He wouldn’t move at all, except — the crying stops. He looks up. Eliot is sitting on the edge of Teddy’s cot, long legs stretched out comically from the short little bed, talking quietly. “What was the washerwoman’s name again? Was it Arielle, like mommy?”

Teddy’s still sniffling, but he shakes his head. “Olar,” he whispers.

“And how does it go? ‘Wash, Olar, wash the rags? Wash the piles and loads and bags?’”

(Wash and laugh, wash and cry, hang them on the line to dry…)

“I want Mommy,” says Teddy, little face scrunching up again on the verge of tears.

“I know, bunny,” Eliot says, resting one hand on Teddy’s hair.

“Where is she?”

“She’s — it’s like she’s in the land afar. In the song. You can’t get there unless the wind takes you, and sometimes you have to wait a long, long while before that happens. But sometimes the wind will carry something for you.”

“What?”

“Your voice, of course. Just like Olar. Remember how her voice travels on the wind? If we could do that, don’t you think your mommy would be happy to hear you sing her song?”

“Yeah,” Teddy decides solemnly, but nothing else follows. Who knows what goes on in children’s heads? Maybe he doesn’t know the words — he’s always asleep by the second verse anyway. Maybe he just can’t bring himself to sing. Quentin gets that — he barely feels like he can talk. But then, he’s never wanted his son to be like him.

“Maybe — I can help you sing it. Since you might be too small for the wind to hear. I’m sure she’ll still know that it’s from you. No one else knows her song, right?”

“Yeah.”

And Quentin watches in astonishment as Eliot moves the hand resting awkwardly on Teddy’s head to his back instead, tucks Quentin’s kid into his side like that’s something he does now, and begins to sing.

Eliot has a beautiful voice: clear and true, the kind of strong voice that would ring out of any chorus by day, but resonates quietly, intimately, heart-quiveringly when it spins a lullaby in the dark. Arielle had a sweet voice too, with good pitch, but Eliot is obviously trained. Quentin never knew. Of course he didn’t — Eliot doesn’t really talk much about his past before Brakebills, and he has certainly never sung Teddy to sleep before. He was content to be cool Uncle El — “Unc-El” as Teddy would portmanteau — happy to pat his head affectionately as he toddled by, toss him high in the sky when he looked up with the big-eyed fascination that small children always carry for tall people, watch him for a couple of hours when Arielle and Quentin wanted to go into town alone. But always an uncle, never a parent.

Eliot cast himself in the role. That’s what he wanted. When Quentin hesitantly told him that Arielle was pregnant, and tried to assure him that it could never mean that Eliot was less important, wanted to say he would be a parent to this baby just as much as Quentin and Arielle would — Eliot just laughed at Quentin’s sputtering, opened his arms for a hug, and said, “Well, I call cool uncle. And fierce aunt too, for Margo, I guess,” with the sad little smile he always got when he brought her up. Laughed again, dragged Arielle into the hug too, when she overheard and joined them and said, “My sister might have something to say about that.”

And if a part of Quentin — the part that’s still leaning in for that tender kiss on the mosaic, no fucks given for the morning after, the part that shudders when something about the way Eliot moves or sits on the edge of his chair triggers a flash of that _other_ night, the desperation of being stripped bare and crawling into the lap of someone fully clothed — if that stupid part wished that Eliot wanted to be _more_ than Teddy’s cool uncle, more than Quentin’s best friend, well, his brain was a bit broken, wasn’t it? He had Arielle, who he loved. He had Teddy. He had Eliot. His life was full. It was more than he ever expected to have. So maybe a part of him wanted to crisscross the connections, and fuck things up as usual, but that part obviously didn’t fit. So what? He's been dealing with that kind of thing his whole life.

He’s like the mosaic: a fucked up jigsaw puzzle with random extra pieces thrown into the mix, but somehow missing the ones that count. There is literally no way to get it to look like the picture on the box. You don’t even have the picture to work from. You just have to do what you can with what you’ve got. Accept a few holes in the finished product. Shove the pieces that don’t fit back in the box. Maybe it’ll never be the beauty of all life, and maybe he’ll never be the person he wishes he could be, but it’s something. He’s something here.

Now, Quentin stays quiet until Eliot finishes the song, a silly yet weirdly sad tale about a washerwoman (not, as he first thought, “Watcher-woman”) who works terribly hard, but whose clean clothes always get blown off their lines by the wind, swept away to the land afar. One day she’s had enough, and sets off on a quest to chase the wind down and find them, and — Quentin has heard this stupid song so many times, in the background as he worked on the mosaic, or even sitting by Arielle on Teddy’s cot as she sang it, but he’s never realized that it’s not about the clothes at all. When Eliot sings it, it’s about an extraordinary person bogged down by an ordinary life, who has the courage to make a change. She never finds the clothes. But on the journey, with all the people she meets and helps along the way, she finds her voice. God, when did Eliot even listen to Teddy’s bedtime song carefully enough to know it by heart? Had he just never noticed?

True to form, Teddy is asleep long before the singing stops. Eliot kisses the top of his head and lays him back down, disentangling himself with the same aching gentleness as he did with Quentin earlier. To whom he now returns, sitting down in his chair, knees touching again.

“Eliot…” He doesn’t know where that sentence is going, really.

“You’re not a shitty father, Q,” Eliot says. “I know shitty fathers. I had one. I — was one. You’re not it.”

“I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do this.”

“So learn.”

“What, simple as that?” They’ve been keeping their voices low, for Teddy’s sake, but Quentin’s cracks a little and rises.

“Not simple. But — not as bad as you think. I know what you are. You’re the sort of person who steps up. Naturally. Even when you’re sad. Even when you think you can’t.”

“Don’t — don’t tell me I’m — that it’s going to get better. It’s not. It’s _not_. It’s _fucked._ ” He is furious all of a sudden, angry at Eliot who can sing and never deigned to until Arielle was dead, angry at having to whisper for Teddy’s sake, angry that they ever came to this world and time at all.

“Q, I am not _telling_ you it’s going to get better,” Eliot says, with peculiar emphasis. “I don’t know why you always accuse me of that kind of optimism. What I am _trying_ to tell you, yet _again_ , is that you’re not alone here.”

Yes, Eliot is still there. Quentin knows that. But — “It’s not the same.” Cool Uncle Eliot is not Arielle. By his own choice, he’s not Quentin’s partner in this parenthood thing. Maybe he misses her, maybe he loves Teddy, maybe he can sing, but it’s not the same.

“No,” Eliot agrees.

“So, you know, I can’t just —”

“It’ll never be the same. But what I’m saying is, maybe — I could try. To help, I mean. I know I’m not Arielle, God knows I could never be as good as her, and I’m not — like you. It’s not natural, for me. I know I’ll never be his dad, not like you are. But maybe, I could try to be — more. Better. Than I am. For him.”

Quentin is — Quentin doesn’t even know what he’s feeling right now. Disbelief on top of relief on top of grief, maybe. Is that a thing? “Eliot…” he says again, still not sure what comes next.

“And for you,” Eliot finishes, in a rush. Quentin is still looking at him like — what is his face even doing? He has no idea. “Because — you know, with me by your side, you are never, ever going to feel like a shitty dad again. All the shittiness is going to be mine. All of it. So you can thank me for that.”

Quentin has zero words. He can’t even manage Eliot’s name now.

“I mean, unless,” Eliot says into the lengthening silence, even more quietly than before. “Unless you think I’d make it worse. For Teddy. That’s okay, really, I under-oof!”

Quentin has no words, but apparently he has the energy to leap off his chair and basically into Eliot’s lap before he even realizes he’s going to move, almost toppling them both over with the force of his hug. He’s not crying anymore, but he’s just breathing into the space carved out of Eliot that feels like it was made for him, if anything in the world was ever made with the design of fitting the life and fuckery of Quentin Coldwater.

Eliot’s arms come up after a shocked second. Wrap around. Hold him close. And they breathe together.

 

**iv. Quentin (Eliot)**

So when Eliot says, a few days post-possession, very tentatively, “Maybe, if you still want to, we could give it a shot?” —

— a part of Quentin recognizes the tone. Once upon a time that never happened, it might have been the part that knew, from the forty some-odd years that grew out of the last time Eliot spoke like this, that Eliot only truly hesitates when he is afraid to ask for something he wants, but thinks he doesn’t deserve.

(But it’s the part that he had to leave behind, that day by Margo’s wedding altar. The time he realized that what he _knew for sure_ , with proof of concept, was actually wrong.)

Human memory isn’t built to remember two lives at once. Even a single life, long and well lived, is hard to hold on to across the years. So a lot of the life that never happened is soft and blurry at the edges, an impressionist haze of green leaves and sunlight dappling the mosaic, the blanket feeling of being warm and loved. He still gets flashes sometimes, crisp and clear, but it’s impossible to resolve the picture into all of its points: how, exactly, they made it work; every moment of disagreement, despair, or loss.

So, Quentin wonders dispassionately, if he _could_ recall Eliot’s face at that moment (offering up the rest of his life to Quentin and Teddy), would he see now what he might have missed then in his overpowering relief? That it was just Eliot, doing what had to be done? Making someone else feel better, not making a choice for himself? After all, when Eliot had a choice…

“El, I love you. But.”

He sees Eliot’s face begin to fall, but it’s like it’s from afar, like looking down at the swarms of people living their happy non-dysfunctional lives from ten stories up all those years ago. It occurs to him that this is an exact reversal of Eliot’s own response to him, that time he asked the same question. It’s not purposeful. He isn’t angry. He doesn’t want Eliot to be unhappy. But he recalls their conversation in the same way as he is experiencing this one: distantly, like the hope and the crushing rejection belonged to someone else.

“I’m tired,” he continues. “Those people we were then — we’re not them anymore. Maybe we never were.” Tries to find a smile, something kind but firm. “You’ve just been through a really traumatizing experience. It makes sense that you want to go back to something that feels simpler. But you’ve got to take care of yourself, get back to yourself. And then we can get back to ourselves, the way we are in this life.”

Quentin means it, truly he does. He wants that. Their friendship here is no insignificant thing, after all; affection and acceptance that run together, so deep and strong and quiet beneath the surface, are rare gifts. If they can get back to that, it will be a safehouse to which they can always retreat, where they will never threaten each other’s hearts, never peel and pick at scabs until the old wounds are exposed, never leave each other raw and vulnerable and hurt. The thing between them that’s always been there can rest, undisturbed. And Eliot knows it too. Judging from the flash of relief in his eyes, he wants to take the out.

But then, alongside the relief, there’s another emotion traced out in the familiar lines of his face. It takes Quentin a moment to recognize fear. A man summoning up his courage.

“Q — you’re the brave one. I was afraid. When you — I didn’t know how you could just reach out and — _ask_ for something like that. Fifty years. The way we were.” There’s something like wonder in his voice and eyes, and something else flutters in response — just once, the tiniest beat of wings — in Quentin’s chest. He feels it through the cold, gray, numb walls he’s finally managed to build around himself, and it’s not — it couldn’t _possibly_ be hope. Not again. Even he’s not that much of a fool.

More resolutely, Eliot continues. “When I felt like I was going to die, you crowned me High King of Fillory, like I was worth something. And inevitably, I fucked it up,” sounding almost like his old self, “but that’s not the point. The point is, you loved Fillory so much and you still believed in me and trusted me with it. And I can’t tell you what that…” He breaks off, takes a breath, starts again. “When I was trapped in my own mind, _you_ were the one who showed me the way out. My projection of you, I mean. And it meant I had to confront the many, many ways I’ve fucked up, and how I probably will again, and how I don’t deserve anything from someone as good, and brave, and generous as you. But I want it, with you. I want everything with you. So this is me. Asking.”

He doesn’t look at all like that old, perfect self, what with the overlong curls, barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans because that’s all they had in the apartment, the uncharacteristic uncertainty in his manner. But it’s Eliot. It’s _Eliot_. And somewhere, Quentin knows that if he stands here and lets himself listen to Eliot finding his voice, Eliot being brave, Eliot reaching out, that deceptive little tremor in his chest is not far from becoming a full-fledged earthquake, sending shocks through the walls he’s built until cracks spread to the foundation. And he can’t — he _won’t_ — break that way again.

“We had just been injected with fifty years of emotion,” Quentin points out, very reasonably. (Eliot’s word, “injected,” like they didn’t live it, like it was inflicted on them from the outside, and never actually belonged to them. But that’s just coincidental. It’s not like he’s aiming to wound. No anger here, not at all.) “Without all the details or the context, just emotion. It’s not real, El. I asked you before because — it felt so clear to me then — that it might work, that we fit together so perfectly. But it’s like the moment when you wake up from a dream and believe crazy things, just before you realize it wasn’t real. In this world, the _real_ world, after everything that’s happened, I don’t believe it anymore.”

As those last five words ring out of him, shockingly final, Quentin feels strong — remote and impregnable in a way he never has before. Anything and anyone could come at him now, and break against his walls instead of ever touching him. Even if it were his dad, dying because of what he did, recrimination in his eyes. Julia, locking him in a hell of his own making, the one she knew would hurt the most. The Alice he loved and betrayed; the Alice who betrayed and hated him in turn. And Eliot. Standing here like he cares.

For once, no stuttering. No maybes. No apologies. Eliot’s taller than him, but it doesn’t feel like that right now. He stares him down and waits for him to fall back.

Eliot takes a step forward instead. A tiny step, not enough to get into Quentin’s face or push back at him, but just enough to reach out and tap Quentin’s hand once, very gently. “Okay,” he says. Takes his hand back. Takes a step back. Makes his way out of the room.

Quentin stays standing, arms rigidly extended at his sides, holding the tension and the strength, until he hears the front door open and close.

*****

So they’re friends.

Once, a long time ago, Quentin worried that things between them might have changed, after _that night_ , but it turned out fine. And once, Quentin _wanted_ things to change, and was disappointed that Eliot didn’t, but that was fine too. Now, he is secure in the knowledge that nothing ever will change between them. Even after that conversation. They’ll be fine.

Eliot is Eliot, supremely practiced at shrugging things off. And mostly, Quentin still feels disconnected from it all, but in a good way, one that makes him feel safe.

Sure enough, in the days following their talk, they breeze past awkwardness or embarrassment, back into familiarity. When he’s well enough for short outings, Eliot gets his hair cut, and at least some of his New York wardrobe back. He spends hours catching up with Margo. He doesn’t push Quentin, but doesn’t avoid him either: he holds up shirts and ties and vests and asks for opinions he doesn’t need; he says, “What are we watching?” and settles down to watch whatever crap Quentin has on, complaining the whole time; he — he acts like himself. It’s nice. Despite himself, Quentin relaxes into it, a little.

Some things are different, but that’s to be expected. Touch seems to come more tentatively to Eliot, post-monster. What was casually affectionate before is more deliberate now — he hesitates before he does it — but he’s getting there. Quentin comes back one evening to find Margo on the sofa, with Eliot’s head resting in her lap, like the old days. The sight of it makes him feel —

Quentin bypasses them and goes to his room.

But then, the next day, he and Eliot are alone in the apartment, as they find themselves from time to time. After all, Eliot is still recuperating from the spell that brought him back, not to mention months of possession by a monster with the self-care abilities of a strung out toddler, and Margo and Quentin are the natural choices to stay with him. (Margo doesn’t leave Eliot’s side at all for the first few days, but eventually Eliot tells her that at least one of them should go get their crown back from that ungrateful land, and count it a victory for the both of them. She must see in his eyes that he’s okay with it, because she’s in and out after that. And even though the constant world hopping must be exhausting, she manages to show up almost every night anyway — ostensibly to complain about how it’s going and let Eliot make her a sympathetic drink with a “there, there, Bambi,” but really, Quentin thinks, so that she can look her fill at Eliot, being Eliot.)

Quentin is sitting on the couch, contemplating the time sink of daytime television. (It’s funny, the things about the mundane world that reel you back in, even after you’ve been off learning magic and adventuring in other lands.) Eliot doesn’t flop down beside him or put an arm around him, unthinking, like he might have before, but from the chair adjacent, he puts his feet up on the couch next to Quentin. Carefully not touching.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Quentin replies.

“So. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry,” Eliot says. “For shooting the Monster, back in Blackspire. That’s what got us into this mess. And I think you got the brunt of it.”

This is… not what Quentin was expecting. But it’s fine. He considers what Eliot is saying, critically. “Are you really sorry?” he asks after a moment. “Wouldn’t you do it again?”

The question gives Eliot pause. “I didn’t agree with you staying behind as its jailor, forever,” he answers slowly. “I still don’t.”

“That’s what I mean. You did what you thought you had to do. And I would have done what I thought I had to do. I still would.”

(It’s the Alice problem, all over again, isn’t it? They don’t agree. No one compromises. Nothing ever changes. Except the way that Quentin is now, it doesn’t hurt anymore.)

“Maybe,” Eliot starts again.

Quentin waits.

“I didn’t agree,” Eliot continues. “When you told us what you had planned, I told you that, but — I didn’t tell you what _I_ was going to do. I shouldn’t have hidden it from you. Maybe I should have trusted you instead.”

What does that mean? “What good would that have done? I would’ve told you not to do it. And you just said, nothing I said would’ve changed your mind.”

“Maybe I could have changed yours. Made you see it wasn’t worth it,” Eliot says, in a rush.

“Not _worth_ it? It was all of magic, El!”

“We could have lived without magic, Q. We were doing it anyway. But I didn’t want to live without you. So I did this stupid thing. I didn’t know it would turn out like this, to be fair. But now I’m thinking that if the alternatives were me being possessed by a monster or you living out eternity as its playmate, we should’ve just said fuck magic, and gone on our merry way. Maybe we could have found another way to get it back, eventually. But even if we didn’t, I would’ve had you. And Margo,” he adds.

And okay, this conversation is getting a little too close to Eliot-related things that Quentin doesn’t want to get into, for reasons, but he focuses on… fuck magic? Magic, and Fillory, are the only things Quentin has ever had going for him. They carried him through years as a lonely misfit, through losing Julia, and Alice, and even Eliot, when Eliot didn’t choose him. The quest for the keys, the thought of fixing magic: these were the things that gave his life purpose, when he needed it the most. Could he have given that up? For what, himself?

“Magic,” Quentin says, “means so much, to so many people. And I ruined it, when I killed Ember. Me, against all that? Eliot, you’re being crazy. You know what being at Brakebills, and finding out magic existed, meant to you, and to everyone there. You know that I’m not worth that. No one is.”

“Not to the world, maybe,” Eliot says. “But fuck the world too. To me, you were worth all of it. You see? And I didn’t tell you, because — I was afraid that I wouldn’t be worth that much, to you. That it wouldn’t be enough, just to have me. And it was easier just to shoot the monster, than to ask.”

Fuck magic, Quentin tries again. For Eliot? If Eliot had really come to him before Blackspire, and said: what if we tried this, you and me. Even if there’s no magic in the world. Maybe we can find another way. But even if we can’t, we’ll have each other.

It’s such a selfish thought, but —

It was easy to sacrifice _himself_ for what he thought was a worthy cause. Quentin has never thought he was worth all that much. But, if he had taken himself out of the equation, if he had known what was going to happen… if the choice were no magic, or no Eliot?

(These are paths Quentin does not tread, anymore, but: when he thought Eliot was dead, he didn’t care about magic. Fillory could have burned to the fucking ground. Nothing else mattered; nothing could be worth that loss. Magic is why he met Eliot at all, sure, but even if they had to live without it, if he could have had Eliot, really had him, all the ways they could have been — and if Eliot is saying, _that’s_ the way he felt about Quentin, _that’s_ what Quentin was worth, even though he couldn’t see himself that way —)

They didn’t agree, both of them too willing to risk themselves and not the other. But if they had put everything on the table, could they have met in the middle, reached an understanding, and made their way forward from there? Brave new world with no magic in it, but facing it together?

Perhaps, Quentin admits to himself. It’s not like it matters. They’ll never know now.

Quentin is silent for too long. He really doesn’t know what to say. But then, Eliot pulls his feet back. Stands up. Raises his arms, conciliatory. And says exactly what Quentin was thinking, totally casual.

“I realize it doesn’t actually matter. Hindsight, and all that.”

“Okay?” says Quentin, taken aback by the about-face.

“I just wanted you to know.” He sits down again, next to Quentin now, but still not touching. “So, what are we watching today, my taste-challenged friend?” As if he doesn’t love daytime soaps, and fill Margo in on the day’s events without fail, every night.

And that’s that.

Okay. What?

*****

So they’re friends, but now they also do this thing where they occasionally have conversations that anyone else would find both exceedingly random and uncomfortably intimate. They’re Quentin and Eliot, though, so it’s fine. It’s hardly the weirdest thing they’ve absorbed into their friendship.

They meet like always, just them or in a group. They talk about what everyone’s doing about magic, or the Library, or the Fillorian crisis of the day; about what’s on TV, or books that Eliot, inexcusably in Quentin’s opinion, has never read. And then, once in a while, they’ll have a weird conversation.

There’s not a pattern to it, really, except that Eliot always initiates.

He says, “I was a musical theater kid. I learned to sing at school. I told my parents I was staying after because I wanted to go out for track. I thought I’d make it big, and show them all, one day.”

Quentin can’t help but ask, “Do you miss it?”

“Sometimes. I wish I’d been good enough. But magic wasn’t such a bad consolation prize,” and smiles.

Quentin admits, “I thought about writing children’s books, sometimes. Before magic. But then I was like, anything I wrote would be too dark for children.”

“It sure as fuck couldn’t be worse than Fillory turned out to be. Did we talk about the bestiality vote?”

Eliot says, after everyone else leaves one day, “I fucking hate Todd. I always have. But it’s because he tries so hard, and it reminds me —“

And how can Quentin not say, gently, “I know, El. I get it.” Because Quentin knows what it is to hate yourself.

Eliot says, “I know you do.” And that’s that. 

It’s never pushy, or even particularly pointed. And Eliot doesn’t seem to expect Quentin to share in turn. It’s not an eye for an eye. But more often than not, Quentin finds himself at least responding, if not saying more. Sometimes he catches himself, but it’s hard. Easier to just go with it, and then let it drop. It’s just how they are, he tells himself, how they’ve always been. It’s fine. He’s safe.

But the whole exercise puts Quentin on edge, and he’s not exactly sure why. After all, it’s not an entirely new thing, the two of them getting into difficult subjects and then letting them drop, easy-peasy. It just always used to be Quentin doing the initiating, and Eliot responding as needed. But then, there was usually some kind of crisis going on. Quentin didn’t bring up these kinds of things _just_ _because_ , like Eliot seems to be doing now.

*****

One day, he asks. Or tries to. It’s actually pretty hard to bring up something that makes you uncomfortable without addressing _why_ it makes you uncomfortable, either to yourself or the person doing it. But talking about why would sort of defeat the purpose, since Quentin is determined to keep his walls up, and avoid all those unnecessary feelings that he’s been keeping separate. It’s been working well, actually, he thinks. This is good. This is fine.

And anyway, Eliot must get what he’s really asking, because he says, “I know we’re friends. I’m not trying to push you into anything else. Cross my heart. I just think sometimes I haven’t been a very good friend. I don’t — share — things. I take it for granted.  That you'll get what I mean.”

“I do too,” Quentin admits without thinking, his mind wandering back to Eliot after Mike — defending Alice from Eliot’s vitriol at Plover’s house, knowing that _Eliot_ could take the harsh words. Eliot when Quentin thought he was going to be expelled, with his blasé offer to find and seduce him, and how Quentin brushed it off with reciprocating nonchalance.

(For a second, his thoughts land on the life that never happened, and Eliot preemptively designating himself the cool uncle before he could hear whatever he thought Quentin was going to say. How Quentin learned to reach out with his body, no conversations or explanations required, because Eliot had everyone so convinced that he didn’t need and would never accept anything else.)

Eliot is still talking when Quentin comes back to himself. “I do it with Margo, too. And it’s nice to have something you don’t have to question. Like you know it’ll always be okay. You’ll be safe. Accepted. But I’m trying —”

Right. Quentin needs to snap out of — whatever his mind had wandered to — right the fuck now. Back to safer roads. “And it will be okay,” he interjects. “We’re okay, Eliot. Seriously.”

“Yeah. I know. But it’s not the same.”

Quentin doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s a truth that he knew once, but that he decided he wasn’t going to feel, anymore. 

*

“You remember the magical spring? _Chatwin’s Torrent_?” Eliot asks, enunciating the title unnecessarily.

“Yes,” Quentin says calmly, even as something in him gasps, or stutters, or stops.

“It’s a nice idea.”

“Yeah.”

“I've been thinking about it, and I don’t think it actually works as advertised.”

Um. “El, we have literally been to Fillory. We know it works.”

“For a leg, sure. Broken bones, severed hands. But like, actually _heal_ you, mind-body-spirit, the way Rupert gets healed?” Eliot wears skepticism, or disdain, more dramatically than anyone else in the world.

Quentin is about to tease, since Eliot usually pretends he doesn’t remember anything he reads, but this conversation is a little too familiar. He thinks, we’ve been here before. No fireplace now, no emotional hangover, no wine, but —

“Why don’t you think it works?” he asks instead.

“I’m beginning to realize. Or remember. Some things are like — the mosaic,” he says, and Quentin is on the edge of something, holding his breath. “ _Chatwin’s Torrent_ is a cop-out. Some things are about the process. A sip from a magical spring… convenient. But not the same as doing it yourself.”

“I don’t know,” Quentin says lightly. “It seems more likely to work. Get you where you actually want to be.” He would know. The _process_ of healing — breaking down and rebuilding yourself — you can _survive_ it, but you’ll never be what you were before. The picture on the box, complete and perfect — that would require a magical intervention.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter how far you get,” Eliot says. “Just that you try.” And Quentin thinks they might be talking about different things, because... what?

*****

“So, I grew up in Indiana,” Eliot tells him one day, out of nowhere as usual. “On a _farm_. Shh, big secret.” He doesn’t seem particularly pained, but Eliot is good at that — staying casual. “Margo knows, of course. But then I told Mike — evil pretending to like me Mike — “

“El,” Quentin cuts in. All of a sudden, this is too much. He doesn’t know why this innocuous story feels like the last straw, but he can’t deal with it. He feels — unsteady. “You know I love you,” he throws out, like a weapon.

“Yes,” Eliot agrees, sounding a little resigned.

“We’re friends. Really. We’re fine. Even if you don’t want to tell me these things. I get it, more than anyone, that there’s some stuff that you don’t want to talk about.”

Eliot rolls his eyes. “Of course I don’t want to _tell_ you. The act of telling this story makes me ill. Even acknowledging that I lived through it is nauseating.” But before Quentin can give this bit of drama the response it deserves, he continues, more stiltedly, “So — telling it is hard. But, if you could read my mind and know it all, it would be okay — I would want you to _know_.”

“Why?” God, Quentin is so _stupid_ , he can’t help but ask.

“So Margo knows this stuff about me,” Eliot repeats, but Quentin is done. He interrupts again.

“El. Why?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Q. Just — listen. Margo knows because she was my partner in the Trials. Stripped bare, not a metaphor, etcetera etcetera. And I guess Fen knew,” he adds as an afterthought. “Sort of. Because I had to explain why I knew anything about farming, so that Fillory wouldn’t starve. I don’t think she really understood the stigma of _Indiana_. But before that, evil Mike knew because I told him, like an idiot.”

“To make him feel better about not knowing the right wine pairing?” Quentin guesses, kind of being a dick but also kind of serious. That’s the usual reason Eliot “most things are not worth caring about” Waugh does things he doesn’t want to do: to make someone else feel less alone, even when he hasn’t known them that long or that well. Mike. Fen. The people of Fillory. Quentin himself, once upon a time.

“It’s easier to do it when you have to,” Eliot says. “Under duress. Or when you can say you’re doing it to help someone else. It’s harder to tell someone things like that just because you _want them to know_. Even Margo — we had to, to pass the Trials. We both did. So we know these soft spots in each other that we never, ever press. Not really. Not in any way that matters. I’m glad she knows, that she understands. But… it’s like, if you have a crush on someone, and they know you do, and you know they know, but the two of you never talk about it. It’s different than telling them your feelings, and listening to their response. You can pretend it’s not there.”

Quentin doesn’t know where this is going, exactly, but he sort of gets it. He forgets his determination not to engage. Falls into the conversation, easy. Why not? “It was like that with Julia, for me. I know what you mean. And when I finally said something, later, when we were fighting, it was the wrong thing to do. I tried to make her feel guilty about it. When she probably already did. And I never wanted her pity. The truth is, she was being kind to me by ignoring it.”

“But if you had told her. Before you were fighting, I mean. Not to guilt her. Just to tell her. What would have happened?”

“I don’t know. What’s the point? It would have been awkward. You can’t make someone return your feelings. She would’ve felt bad about it. And I would have been embarrassed she knew.”

“But she knew anyway, right?”

“Yes, but —“ It’s not the same, Quentin thinks, trailing off. Knowing that she knew was embarrassing, of course, but it was a muffled sort of embarrassment. It was like his feelings lived under a blanket in a dark room they both knew existed, but found it easy to walk past. Telling her would have been like forcing a spotlight on that soft, weak, vulnerable part of himself, and trusting her to do him no harm.

Why would anyone ever do that? It’s an act of foolishness, or courage, maybe, if you’re being charitable, but to what end? What do you achieve? What is Eliot hoping —

“I told Mike,” Eliot says quietly. “To make him feel better, yes. But also a little because I wanted — a part of me hoped — he might be the person I could tell and he would stay anyway. And for a second, it was like he did — and then it turned out — well, it hurt, you know? It fucked me up.”

(Quentin does know. He doesn’t want to, but he does. What Eliot is talking about — reaching out, daring to hope that someone will be there to meet you halfway — isn’t that something that Quentin believed in trying, once upon a time?)

He says, “Yeah,” and as if by mutual agreement, they let it drop. Nothing new. They talk about other things until their friends join them, at which point it inevitably becomes a discussion of all the problems in their lives and their complete lack of progress on how to solve them.

But the conversation stays with Quentin for hours afterward, into the night. He lies awake in the dark, straining to recall: did Eliot tell him this in Fillory, in the years that are now washed out with happiness and love in his memory, but sparse in details? Did they make themselves open and vulnerable and weak to each other? Was that why it worked? And was it worth it in the end?

And then he remembers that he doesn’t dwell on those things now. But it still matters, something in him insists vaguely, just as he’s drifting off to sleep. Whatever happened in that old life, it means something that Eliot is telling him now.

*****

The day it clicks into place is nothing special.

Eliot is lounging on the couch, legs stretched out, recounting another one of his harrowing High King experiences that Quentin wasn’t around for. Quentin doesn’t really remember how they got on to the topic. He’s getting some water from the fridge, hmming and exclaiming at the right moments.

It doesn’t feel dangerous, or tentative, anymore. He’s comfortable, the way he was with Eliot from the very beginning. He thinks they might actually have found their way back to themselves, despite everything Eliot has been doing to — not exactly _upset_ the equilibrium, but shift it.  None of _those moments_ have happened today. He’s content like this. He pours the water. Puts the pitcher down on the counter. Reaches out to open the fridge door again. And suddenly, for no particular reason at all —

His mind wanders back to Julia, for a second: the way he loved her before, and the different way he does now. To Alice, and the way he tried to love her just as she was, so relentlessly, for so long, only to realize she had changed into someone else right in front of him. And then Eliot… how every time, with each of them, he thought he understood what love meant, reached out for it with everything he had, and how every time, he wasn’t right, and he fell short.

But was he actually wrong?

Isn’t love the thing that helps you change and grow and take risks you wouldn’t have before, be someone you couldn’t have otherwise, all because you now have support?

Isn’t love the thing that makes it okay to get stuff wrong, or feel like you’re not enough, because you’re not just loved for what you can do, but for who you are?

And isn’t it the thing that says — all the experiences that have hurt you, all the broken pieces left of you — those are actually the most beautiful ones, because they allow you to meet another person’s faults and hurts with compassion and understanding and acceptance? To connect in a way you couldn’t have otherwise?

Maybe it is and it isn’t — all of these, and none. With strange clarity, Quentin recalls the day he solved the mosaic. He considers the beauty of all life: so many tiles they arranged in countless permutations over the years, lovely and bright and beautiful, and never enough. How none of them were the solution, and in the end, it was only a single piece that mattered. Maybe he’ll never know exactly what that piece was, how to define it or name it. But he knows that he could never have found that one without going through all the rest.

He thinks about how he was afraid, at the start of this, when they got Eliot back, that the sheer joy and relief of seeing him (hearing him, feeling him) could shatter the walls Quentin had built to protect himself.

But everything Eliot has been doing since then — all these conversations that Quentin has been trying so hard to shy away from, but can’t help falling into, easy — the way Eliot doesn’t push, but just _offers_ — maybe it’s not about _breaking down_ Quentin’s walls. Maybe he’s been trying to give Quentin something back.

See, Quentin has broken, and Quentin has rebuilt himself, again and again and again. And every time he’s done it, he realizes, he’s left something out. All those pieces that he cast off, or locked away over the years — the ones that never seemed to fit, the ones that hurt, the ones he thought no one wanted — without those pieces, maybe walls are the only structure you can manage to build. You shape yourself into something cold, remote, and numb, because that’s the only way you think you can stay standing. And when you’re disconnected from those painful things — the ways you love, the capacity for hope, the willingness to reach out and try — you don’t feel their lack. You don’t even understand why they mattered in the first place. So how can you possibly find them again, and build anew? You can’t, except —

For all the pieces that Quentin cast off, here’s Eliot, offering some of his own up. Filling in the gaps.

Here’s Eliot, saying out loud: You make me braver. You make me better. You’re the person who pulls me out of the worst parts of myself.

Eliot, saying, with everything he does: I love our friendship, the way it is. I love you, the way you are. Even if we’re never more than this, every day for the rest of our lives, you’re enough. Even if you’ve changed, and can’t take a chance on me again, I’m still here.

Eliot, sharing the broken parts of himself, the things that have hurt him and made him the person he is, even when he hates that person. Giving them to Quentin for safekeeping, because he trusts him, and wants to be known, and because it brings them closer together.

Eliot…

Well, fuck.

“El,” he interrupts Eliot mid-sentence in some kind of indignant tirade on — economic sanctions in Fillory? What? “Ask me again.”

He is definitely the fool of this story.

Eliot stops, nonplussed. Quentin doesn’t know what his face is doing right now, but it must be something pertinent because then, slowly, Eliot smiles. It’s that heart-stopping look of wonder again, like he doesn’t believe Quentin is an actual person saying and doing the actual things he is saying and doing. But also, a little, like he wants to believe.

(Maybe it’s worth being foolish for this.)

Eliot stands up. Adopts a serious expression. Walks toward Quentin like he is still royalty, all pomp and circumstance and purpose.

“Quentin _Coldwater_ ,” he says, stopping a few feet short of him, and Quentin is _laughing_. It’s just the way he said it — supercilious, with a little moue of disbelief — as he rose from his outlandish pose on the wall outside Brakebills, before Quentin knew anything about him beyond his outrageous, overwhelming physical beauty. Before he believed that he was real, let alone knew all the pieces, the layers, the softness and the strength, knew Eliot down to the atoms of him.

Somehow, Eliot is keeping a straight face, like this is the performance of his life. Giddy in his reckless foolish hope reborn, Quentin is enjoying the laughter, the old camaraderie. The thing is, it’s not a façade. This is Eliot — the self he chose for himself — and the showmanship and the wit are as much a part of him as anything else he’s laid bare. There has just always been _more_ to that self than what is on the surface, more than he lets most people understand, but which he wants Quentin to know. This is still their easy friendship, quick and constant and true, but evolving, growing, in the process of becoming whole.

He lets Eliot take both his hands and lift them up to his lips, like they’re in some courtly romance, or back at the crowning ceremony so long ago, if Eliot had been the one to crown him. This isn’t exactly a role he’s used to playing, but even the flush of embarrassment is pleasant. Wildly, weirdly, he’s expecting more drama to follow: Eliot dropping to one knee and declaiming his devotion, or bursting into song, or something else ridiculous and perfectly awful. Anything but —

Eliot tilts his head. Quirks a little smile. Meets Quentin’s eyes. Lets their hands fall, still holding on. “Q. I love you. I’m sorry I hurt you. I said I was working on some character defects a long time ago, and I’m still working. I have a feeling this is going to be a lifelong-fucking-endeavor. But will you, maybe, consider sticking around for that? Because I think — I _believe_ we can still work. I think we’ll always fit together. Because you’re a part of me now. The best part.”

He lets go of Quentin’s hands, and brings his own up to brace on Quentin’s shoulders, telegraphing the movement. And stands there with his arms extended, reaching out, looking and letting himself be seen. His hold is gentle, an offer he knows Quentin could step back from, but that he’s making anyway.

What can Quentin do with that, besides meet him in the middle?

He takes a step forward (feeling those arms slide down and wrap around him, a hand finding its way back to the familiar place on his neck). Tilts his face up. Lets Eliot close the distance.

**Author's Note:**

> **More detailed warning:  
> The suicidal ideation here encompasses both passive thoughts (i.e. “wishful thinking” about not being alive) and consideration of plans, which would be classified as a more active form. The plans are brief, not graphic, and never acted upon. Overall, these portions of the story draw from the line in the show about how Quentin had given thought to which buildings in Midtown someone might use for a suicide attempt, and depict him in that mindspace (standing at heights, idly looking at the ground). Any active suicidal ideation is most prominent in the first part, but passive thoughts recur throughout the second and third parts as well.  
> If any of these are triggers for you, I hope that I’ve clarified adequately (feel free to let me know if you'd like more info), and please, please, take care of yourself!  
>  
> 
> Thank you for reading! Now, I feel the need to offer a rambling explanation you didn’t ask for:
> 
> This is not the story I set out to write. Actually, I didn’t plan on writing anything at all, because 1) I haven’t attempted to write fiction in ten long, soulless years (please be gentle), and 2) I started watching this show a couple of months ago as a distraction, not intending to get emotionally invested. You see how well that worked out. 
> 
> Anyway, as I was watching season 3, but spoiled through 4x05, I was inspired by a kissing gifset. (Yes, I know, they don’t even kiss in this till the last line, and even then it’s just implied. Welcome to my life.) Someone had put the three Q/E kisses side-by-side, for posterity. And you can see that the ones from 3x05 and 4x05 are so tender and lovely, which I adore, of course, but then there’s the one from season 1, and that is just NOT like the others. We only get a few seconds in the show, but seriously, when you see it frame by frame, it is messy and desperate and out of control. And that got me thinking about what was different. Loss of inhibitions, sure, but if that kind of potential energy exists between them, simmering under the surface, how is it possible that they never tap into or talk about it again? 
> 
> From there, the story got away from me, and turned into this meditation on dissociation, whether feeling disconnected from others, or cutting parts out of yourself: what that does to you, why you might choose to do it, and what it takes to reconnect. I’m not convinced that any of this makes sense outside my own head, but some combination of these two ideas — how Quentin never looks at his connection with Eliot straight on (ha), and how he disconnects from himself — is what ate me alive until I wrote this.
> 
> When the finale happened, I was crushed. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the rest of season 4, hence the lack of plot in the aftermath. I wasn’t sure I could finish this story. But I did in the end, because I wanted to reach something hopeful for these two. 
> 
> TL;DR: I set out to write about kissing. I ended up with 18,000 words on depression, disconnection, the courage of hope, and how sometimes even the bravest people need a little help. It may make no sense. C’est la vie?


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